The Lovereading4Kids comment

Nothing ever goes to plan where Ruby Rogers is concerned but if you have a feisty girl desperate for role models then Ruby’s the girl she needs. Full of mischief and mayhem but a great deal of fun mixed in, it can’t fail to make a reader out of a reluctant reader and a mad-keen reader even more keen. Other titles in this series include Waste of Space, Walking Legend, Get Me Out of Here, and Party Pooper.

Synopsis

Ruby Rogers: Get A Life! by Sue Limb

Ruby's teacher asks Ruby and Yasmin to look after a new girl at school. Her name is Lauren, and it is not long before she manages to upset the uneasy equilibrium between the two best friends.

About the Author

Sue Limb is the bestselling author of the Girl, 15 books featuring Jess Jordan. Her other children’s books include Come Back, Grandma, which was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. Sue lives on a remote organic farm near Nailsworth in Gloucestershire. Chocolate SOS, published by Bloomsbury in January 2012, is another side-splittingly funny story featuring the crazy confessions of charming but insane Jess Jordan.

For 7+ year olds there’s:RUBY
ROGERS - Ruby wants to be a gangster when she grows up. Not a horrid
violent one, obviously - more a kind of female Robin Hood living in the
treetops, preferably with a troupe of monkeys, a species Ruby adores.
Her human family consists of a teasing eccentric older brother Joe, a
Geography teacher father who has no sense of direction, and a midwife
mum who regularly falls asleep on the sofa instead of providing lavish
suppers. Ruby's best friend Yasmin is a Muslim, though not so you'd
notice. Yasmin loves dolls and clothes and is shrewd about
relationships. She and Ruby have a fiery but devoted friendship and
through Yasmin's older sister Zerrin, Ruby gets to know Holly
Helvellyn, Gothic eccentric and Ruby's ultimate role model.

For 12+ year olds there’s:ZOE
AND CHLOE Chloe and Zoe are best friends, unless there are boys around,
of course in which case it’s every girl for herself. Deliciously
comedic, the obsessions, embarrassments, disasters and joys of teen
life are captured with pitch-perfect comic timing.

As well as:GIRL,
15... Life can be trying when your best friend is a goddess, you are a
woeful underachiever, and your love-life is as messy and as mucky as a
sticky quagmire of mud. Painfully spot on, the Girl... series reveals
with Technicolor precision the agony and the ecstasy (and the
embarrassment) of being a teenager. With razor-sharp observation and
deadpan humour we are offered a privileged peek at the life of Jess,
charming, but most definitely insane. This series has a unique voice
and humour that will make you want to read it again and again - if you
can bring yourself to put the books down in the first place.

A Q & A with Sue Limb

Q. Where do you get inspiration from?

A. I always set my books in places familiar to me. Otherwise it would be like taking an exam in Physics without ever opening a textbook! I admire writers such as Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling who can let their imaginations fly into the most amazing fantasy. But I do like my own arena: everyday comedy.

A. I think I write to amuse myself and to keep myself interested in a character. I’m always delighted and rather surprised when I hear from readers that they’ve enjoyed a book. When I was younger, if I was stuck with a book I used to imagine I was writing it as a kind of letter to amuse somebody I fancied. I suppose this would make me pull out all the stops and try my very best to impress! But nowadays I have become a bit more chilled out about life. I don't get wild crushes these days, although sometimes I dream that famous old men are kind to me…(Bill Clinton, David Attenborough, if you really want to know.)

A. If a character is interesting, and she or he has a plan or an agenda, and then obstacles crop up which interfere with the plan, the plot will take care of itself.

A. Sometimes I just have a character with an ambition - the ambition can be very minor - and then just take it from there. I think it's always useful to have surprises in a story - somebody behaving very differently from normal because of a secret reason....

A. No! I never do. Many writers feel their characters take over and grab the steering wheel! I've only just completely rewritten a book (Zoe and Chloe: Out to Lunch) because the outline I had originally sketched out didn't work, and I realised I had to start at the beginning again and move one of the characters across a whole continent so he could participate in the story more.

A. It should unfold with surprises, grip you and involve you. The character or characters should be interesting people you would like to meet. You should, when reading it, be unaware of your immediate surroundings and find the book really hard to put down.

A. If you're still at school, your English teacher. I have editors at my publishers who do that kind of thing for me. My daughter (who is 22 so was recently a teenager) offers helpful advice when she thinks my choice of words is too old-fashioned.

A. Send it to publishers and agents, and if it keeps getting rejected, just keep on sending it.

A. Follow the advice in The Writers and Artists' Yearbook. Always present your manuscript double spaced and only on one side of the paper!

A. "Give your characters difficulties and don't try too hard to be funny all the time." Oh – and never stop reading, and as you read, notice how other writers are working.